This Cooking Trick Cuts Rice Calories in Half
 

From TIME magazine
http://time.com/3754097/rice-calories-starch/

This Cooking Trick Cuts Rice Calories in Half

Strangely enough, it involves adding fat

by Mandy Oaklander ~mandyoaklander
March 23, 2015

A cup of white rice has about 200 calories—not insignificant considering it’s most often used as a small part of a larger dish. But there’s an easy, natural way to make rice less caloric: add a little fat, then let it cool. According to research presented at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting, using coconut oil and a refrigerator can slash calories by as much as 60%.

Rice is made up of both digestible and resistant starch. Humans don’t have the enzymes to digest that second type, so resistant starch isn’t transformed into sugar and absorbed in the bloodstream like digestible starch. The more resistant starch a food has, the fewer calories from that starch our bodies will absorb.

Researchers from the College of Chemical Sciences in Sri Lanka wanted to figure out if they could convert some of rice’s digestible starch into the non-digestible type, and thereby make it less caloric. By testing out 38 different kinds of rice and simulating human digestion in a test tube, they devised a recipe for the least caloric way to cook rice: drop a teaspoon of coconut oil into boiling water, then add half a cup of non-fortified white rice and cook it for about 40 minutes. After cooking, stick it in the fridge for 12 hours.

Rice cooked this way had at least 10 times the resistant starch as normally prepared rice, and 50-60% fewer calories, the researchers say.

Here’s how it works: the glucose units in hot cooked rice have a loose structure, but when it cools down, the molecules rearrange themselves into very tight bonds that are more resistant to digestion, says Pushaparaja Thavarajah, PhD, who supervised the study. Scientists already know that it works in potatoes, but in the new study, researchers thought that adding a fat like coconut oil could add extra protection. It seemed to. The fat molecule wedges its way into the rice, Thavarajah says, and provides a barrier against quick digestion.

Making rice starch more resistant has other perks besides cutting calories. It’ll also feed your good bacteria. “The resistant starch is a very good substrate, or energy source, for the bacteria inside the human gut,” says Thavarajah.

Best of all, the researchers found that reheating the rice didn’t change the levels of resistant starch—so the calorie hack is safe for leftovers, too.

Read next: 4 Ways to Eat More and Still Lose Weight











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This is what the Jaminets of the Perfect Health Diet have suggested for years. You must first cook and then cool rice to convert it to resistant starch, and reheating in oil (a la fried rice) is OK as it remains "resistant". I don't remember them stating that it "cuts calories" but that the rice is processed by bacteria in a more beneficial manner to our gut.

I believe the resistant starch can't be broken down and absorbed by the small intestine. However, it can be broken down in the large intestine by a different set of beneficial bacteria. This process also helps the bacteria grow. :yum:

This is dangerous information for me! Although I've never been a big rice eater, sometimes it's nice to have with foods that are spicy.

Wait, you mean a calorie isn't a calorie? The number of calories calculated from burning food in a bomb calorimeter might yield a different caloric value from how it's actually metabolized in the body? Hmmm, I think I'm getting deja vu here.

[/sarcasm]

I'm going to keep looking into this. As much as I love being in ketosis or close to it, I'm fed up of the chronic insomnia. Having a dinner starch has been a decent strategy for me, though none of the tricks that I've tried is 100%. I might pull my rice salad recipe out for more than just the family gatherings.

But does it do anything for the carbs? My BG reacts to carbs, not calories.

Interesting!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...50323075233.htm

Science Daily gives a different mechanism of action, from another study team member;




I am leery. Richard Nikoley has had some anecdotes on his blog of type II's whose blood glucose was well controlled after taking resistant starch, and of people who didn't go immediately out of ketosis after a large dose. Not everybody needs to be in ketosis, I'm open to the idea that just slowing the carbs down might be good enough for some people.

The idea of complex carbohydrates never really did anybody much good, but that's because the premise was flawed, complex carbs like potatoes and bread were only assumed to be asborbed at a slow rate, that turned out to be nonsense.

I'm ready for some RS, where is the RS potato guy?

How much does normally prepared rice have, 10X is quite an improvement. Cooling rice cuts cals by as much as 60% !

Well my raw potato try was a total failure a few years back. Look forward to seeing someone doing the rice test.

I also look forward to somebody else trying this. :lol:

I tried raw potato for a while. The total lack of yumminess kept me from continuing it. Then I tried raw potato starch. I mixed it with some heavy cream and a little flavoured sweetener into a sort of pudding--which I then binged on. So that's out of my life.

Yes, who cares about the calories! I want to know how it will affect my blood sugar. Rice is one thing that totally drives my BG way up (and for the most part my BG is very good). When I get new test strips, I'll have to try that cooking method. Though I have to say, I don't really miss rice at all--it seems like just a bland receptacle for the good stuff.

I thought I would miss it, but I don't. I love the smell as it cooks, but not the taste. Sort of like beer - good smell, bad taste. :)

However this pans out, my bet's the cauliflower rice trick works better.

This sounds interesting but my first reservation is that it's from "Science Daily" which almost never provides sourcing to a published paper. Second concern is that I can't find this on PUBMED which is my personal stamp of authenticity. It is on the American Chemical Society (ACS) who rate highly but are not generous with the open access. Best ACS link I can find is http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/p...sity-rates.html which is in the nature of a press release.
I've had a look at the Resistant Starch (RS) info on various sources and I'm quite happy it's real and significant, and quite separate from the ill-defined notion of "Complex Carbs".

The main problem being that type 3 RS usually occurs as a minor (5%) percent with the bad old regular starch. The numbers (50%) being quoted here would be very high and interesting if backed up by good links, which they aren't.
I'll continue to watch this space.

Does Richard Nikoley even believe his own hype about RS anymore? In response to a comment by Mike Eades a few months ago, Nikoley said "RS is sooooo April 2014", which I took to mean a fad is a fad so move on already.

I'll stick with cauliflower rice, which also has more nutrients.